I had a couple of Personal Use sales back in January. The images didn't seem to be the sort of thing you'd put on your wall (a hospital sign and an ambulance outside A and E) so I queried it with Alamy.

Yesterday both sales were refunded and two new sales added at four times the original PU fee.

Is there any page on Alamy where this still works? I used to check the zooms in my Pseudonym Summary that way.

How do you go about it?

wim

I added this to my bookmarks bar. If I click on it on a page that has no images, it tells me so. But if I click on it on any page with images, it does nothing. Doesn't seem to matter what site I use it on.

Strange you have a photo of a bird for your avatar and a forum name for a cat. Just saying.

Allan

I just looked back, and in the last 12 months, I've had PU sales ranging from $10.26 to $19.99.

It's not a cat, it's a Fossa, but sadly I don't have a photo of one. I'm pretty sure I had the forum name before we had avatars, but I remember it was about a year after avatars were introduced that I put a pic up, so the name came first.

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Sorry I should have said "cat like" animal. There are quite a few images on the web, I,m sure you could find a freebie somewhere.😄

Allan

It gets better: if I'd called myself Parus to match the photo, that would be archaic, as the bird which all my life was Parus caeruleus has now been assigned to a different family and is Cyanistes caeruleus. 🙄

Not sure, but remember when the US office was opened, Alamy increased their commission to help pay those expenses. Charging US customers double for PU might also be a way of paying for that office. ? Or maybe it's just because the US economy has done so well. ? I'm pretty sure fees for sales to the US are generally higher, not just PU.

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For a long time now I have not allowed PU/Novel or newspaper subs etc for any of my images, while I don't sell vast numbers, what I have seen is that my ave picture sale price is starting to rise again 2017 (€29.64) 2018 (€36.59 and so far in 2019 (€44.27) now it s a way off the ave of 2011/13 of c€85, but Alamy do seem to be able to get reasonable prices again. If you don't offer your product at basement rates, you won't get basement rates.

I, too have opted out of everything I can opt out of, and am very pleased that my average fee is going up. Never have been interested in the low fee uses, no matter how many.

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I've opted most of my RM images out of PU - at least all the landscapes and seascapes and such that I sell as prints on POD sites, on which I usually make $$$ rather than the $6.99-19.99 fees I've received for PU sales. I wish I could opt out my RF images as well, or that we could set our own PU prices. The only saving grace so far is that all my PU sales are images I tend to sell as greeting cards. I think most people looking for framed prints aren't looking here, but worry it's only a matter of time before there's an "Alamy Collection" on FAA. That would hurt my POD sales and I'll have to consider removing some RF images, which would be a shame.

My average prices went up considerably this year (six months in my revenue is roughly even with last year's and I've only had about half as many images licensed as last year.) . Although most of my RM images aren't in the PU scheme, I have many RF images that are, and I'm also in the newspaper scheme and with all the distributors, and don't have exclusive images here either, so perhaps Alamy is managing to get better prices. At least that's my experience this year.

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I just moved all my recent images from RF to RM and selected "Don't sell for personal use." However, since a customer can get the same high resolution image at the same price by choosing "Presentation or Newsletter Use" , I don't know how effective this will be.

Rick Boden

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Not sure what the fuss is about. The lowest PU sale price is higher than the Newspaper scheme web usage fee, while the highest is currently coming in at about my average sale price. I've dumped Novel Use, but very much sticking with PU. Maybe it depends what market you are operating in and the likely use of your photos?

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This was a sale cancellation as we had actively spotted some fraudulent activity on the purchasing account and banned the user in question.

Also, to pick up another thread of conversation here, differences in price and territory are common depending on what type of user you are and whether or not we are running any a/b pricing tests at the time.

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So does that mean that the fraudster gets to keep the file they downloaded, but the contributor has their payment taken away? Please clarify.

No payment was received and no payment would ever have been received as it was credit card fraud. The sale was cancelled rather than any money refunded. This is another reason why credit card sales don't clear instantly, as we need to allow time for potential fraud to be reported to us so we can cancel before a contributor is actually paid.

It's likely the user in question had no actual interest in that particular image, however it's impossible to know for sure.

These situations are unfortunate but thankfully rare - frustratingly they are impossible to prevent 100% of the time.